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With the publication of The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida in 2002, the ‘creative city’ became the new hot topic among urban policymakers, planners and economists. Florida has developed one of three path-breaking theories about the relationship between creative individuals and urban environments. The economist Åke E. Andersson and the psychologist Dean Simonton are the other members of this ‘creative troika’. In the Handbook of Creative Cities, Florida, Andersson and Simonton appear in the same volume for the first time. The expert contributors in this timely Handbook extend their insights with a varied set of theoretical and empirical tools. The diversity of the contributions reflect the multidisciplinary nature of creative city theorizing, which encompasses urban economics, economic geography, social psychology, urban sociology, and urban planning. The stated policy implications are equally diverse, ranging from libertarian to social democratic visions of our shared creative and urban future.

Chapter 16: Creative Cities Need Less Government

Handbook Chapter

Extract

16 Creative cities need less government David Emanuel Andersson Over the past 40 years, creative cities have come to embody traits that reflect the ongoing transformation of the world’s most developed regions into an emergent post-industrial and postmodern society. This transformation is affecting almost all aspects of life: manufacturing is being outsourced, production strategies are being increasingly focused on the creation of knowledge and values are becoming postmodern. Creative cities are the centres of gravity of this new society in the making. A statistical analysis of creative cities would reveal many structural commonalities. Some of these commonalities represent a continuation of established roles in the spatial division of labour. Like the urban foci of merchant and industrial capitalism, interregional trade volumes attain their greatest volumes in the stock, real estate and merchandise markets of the largest creative cities. These cities are also the most multicultural cities; ethnic diversity indices reach their highest levels in New York and Toronto. But the unprecedented concentrations of creative workers such as scientists, artists and entertainers are even more emblematic of post-industrialism (Lakshmanan et al., 2000). Richard Florida (2002) describes this phenomenon as the emergence of a new creative class. NEW VALUES AND THE DIVISION OF KNOWLEDGE Less familiar is the change in values that is taking place in the world’s most postindustrial regions. Ronald Inglehart (1997) calls this change ‘postmodernization’. The postmodern value system refers to a cluster of values that exhibits significant positive correlations among individual responses to interview surveys. This cluster includes...

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